Gaming computer advice

PCros

I'm currently thinking of getting a custom built gaming PC and was just wondering if there is any advice to keep in mind before buying? Budget would be around €1500-1700.

For example should I go Intel or AMD / Nvidia or AMD. I would like to get back into the Flight Sim series and would love to get the best out of the game in terms of graphics as they have knocked it out of the park with what I have seen.

Also in terms of supplier who would be good?

This one here caught my eye:
https://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/system/IEM-Champion

JoyPad

Intel is lagging badly behind AMD on the CPU scene. The newly launched Zen 3 AMD CPUs will (most likely) be the best thing for a while.

Intel have announced their new shiny thing for March 2021, but they are still playing catchup with AMD, and poorly at that. The new shiny thing will be the old shiny thing (same 14nm technology they have been flogging for the past 10 years), but with support for PCIe gen 4, which AMD has had for about a year already.

So, unless you must have it today, I would wait a bit and see the performance of the new AMD CPUs, as so far we only have their word on them. In a couple of weeks, we will have independent reviews and comparisons against the Zen 2 CPUs and against the best that Intel has to offer.

As for the GPUs, that's also in limbo. AMD has new GPUs launching soon, but we have no clue yet how powerful they would be, pricing, etc. That PC you saw there comes with last year's NVIDIA GPU, which today has been soundly beaten by this year's latest NVIDIA GPU, but these latter ones are very hard to come by, because everyone and their gran wants them.

There are a few other sites where you can peek at prebuilt systems. AWD-IT, pcspecialist, overclockers and scan (all are UK based, but deliver to Ireland). There are some Irish sites as well, but usually come with a much higher price tag.

PCros

Thank you for the reply - definitely food for thought.

Can I ask are the Nvidia GPU's you mention the 3080/3090 models?

JoyPad

PCros wrote: »

Thank you for the reply - definitely food for thought.

Can I ask are the Nvidia GPU's you mention the 3080/3090 models?

Indeed, the latest Nvidia are the 30-series, of which they announced 3 models so far: 3080, 3090 and soon a 3070 model.
There are rumors of other cards in the series. A 3060 is all but confirmed. It's possible that Nvidia will announce other cards after AMD's launch, to counter.

Overheal

The GPU war is still being fought, AMD will announce it's next flag ship in less than 2 weeks, and the new Zen 3/Ryzen 5000 CPUs will hit the market on November 5th, with Roughly a 19% increase in Instructions Per Second over Zen 2. If you see a Zen 2/Ryzen 3000 (4000 was laptop CPUs) for 20% off or more I'd say that's a good bargain but that's probably a bit of a unicorn.

I haven't heard what RAM it likes best but with Zen architecture faster is better but you can get comparable performance with even slower and under-spec RAM - 3200 Mhz is the default. Eg. In this video they take 2133 Mhz RAM and overclock the "infinity fabric" under the Zen architecture to get comparable performance to higher performance RAM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHJ16hD4ysk

As for Chipset B550 or X570 are good, 400 series is functional and updates will be coming in January for those boards to support Zen 3 CPUs (If using Zen 2, not much bother). On the X570, there's a 4x PCIe 4.0 link from the chipset to the CPU, the B550 iirc is PCIe 3.0. If the fastest lanes are important to you that is. The newest NVMe drives using PCIe 4 are already operating faster than PCIe 3.0 can support, but unless you need screaming loading and retreival times, or the extreme future-proofing PCIe 3.0 is fine and GPUs aren't bottlenecked by 3.0, storage drives etc. are taking advantage of the memory rate. Overall, the B550 boards are great value, and the current X570 boards require an onboard fan for the chipset, which can be a downer, but refresh boards are coming from a few vendors afaik like ASUS which have engineered-out the on-board fan.

JoyPad

Overheal wrote: »

On the X570, there's a 4x PCIe 4.0 link from the chipset to the CPU, the B550 iirc is PCIe 3.0. If the fastest lanes are important to you that is. The newest NVMe drives using PCIe 4 are already operating faster than PCIe 3.0 can support, but unless you need screaming loading and retreival times, or the extreme future-proofing PCIe 3.0 is fine and GPUs aren't bottlenecked by 3.0, storage drives etc. are taking advantage of the memory rate. Overall, the B550 boards are great value, and the current X570 boards require an onboard fan for the chipset, which can be a downer, but refresh boards are coming from a few vendors afaik like ASUS which have engineered-out the on-board fan.

The B550 boards have no PCIe 4.0 in the chipset, but there is 4.0 from the CPU for the first m.2 socket and the first GPU slot. Any other PCIe slots will be 3.0, from the chipset.

The X570 boards have PCIe 4.0 support in the chipset, thus allowing for a second or third m.2 slot supporting gen 4 drives.

As always, the number of lanes is limited, and shared across slots. This is only a problem in systems that have many NVMe drives and/or PCIe extension cards.

An interesting problem occurs on 400 boards, where there will be support for Zen 3 CPUs (in January), but no PCIe 4.0 support, not even in those slots connected to the CPU. It's unclear if this can be provided with a BIOS update on those boards. Watch this and this.

salamiii

the one in your link is to expensive
you could build one for half that.when NVidia brings out it's 3070 video card and amd bring out it's one.other gpu prices have to drop 50%
to competete with 500 dollar price expect amd to be priced lower to compete.intel has out it's 11th gen as it's new 10th gen could not compete with amd new 4500 and 4700 cpu(laptop)
now amd i s brining out a 5000 cpu so intel will bring out 12th gen to compete

Aodhan5000

OP, just in case you're unaware (no offense meant to you or anything) but take no notice of the salami dude. He's just a troll full of horsesh*t